Latest Articles

Chinese New Year is ahead and economists have their predictions about the country’s economy ready. Much of their gloomy prospects (Over-investment, too much debt, bubbly markets, faked data, Ponzi-like financial structures) depends on their location, observes business analyst Shaun Rein, author of The War for China’s Wallet: Profiting from the New World Order, according to Bloomberg. Those located in China tend to get the uptick in the economy better than those observing China from afar.

Tencent is one of the world’s largest and most influential IT companies, but very few know what the company looks like. WeChat expert Matthew Brennan made for China Channel the Tencent Report, a short introduction to the company.

Who killed more, Hitler or Stalin, is a question often asked. Journalist Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, argues – 60 years after the Great Leap Forward started – that Mao Zedong is often wrongly excluded from this debate. But he opts for a nuanced approach in The New York Review of Books, although in numbers Mao beats both Stalin and Hitler.

hejiang province, with its capital Hangzhou, have developed into a preferred destination for billionaires, says Rupert Hoogewerf, founder of the Hurun China rich list. Zhejiang not only passed domestic cities like Beijing and Shanghai, but also Paris and San Francisco in the 2018 Hurun report, writes the Digital Journal.

Deep insight in consumer behaviour is what marketing should offer, writes branding guru Tom Doctoroff, author of What Chinese Want: Culture, Communism, and China’s Modern Consumer, on his LinkedIn page. Cluttering that insight with “exaggerated faith in algorithms, programmatic efficacy and hyper-personalization,” is not helpful he adds. And: “Insights are not observations.”

May last year Robert Lighthizer was sworn in as US trade representative. He is the key person to watch when a trade war between China and the US is developing, says leading economist Arthur Kroeber, author of China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know®, in the South China Morning Post.

Stability and tradition in China are much stronger over the generations than many outsiders assume, marketing guru Tom Doctoroff, author of What Chinese Want: Culture, Communism, and China’s Modern Consumer, argues in this video clip for Amcham. Tensions between generations do exist in China too, but they are different from those elsewhere in the world, he argues.

The world had one year to get used to Donald Trump’s approach to trade deals: bilateral trade deals rather than plurilateral regional trade deals. Former World Bank official Harry Broadman explains for Forbes why Trump’s approach for international deals is going to fail.

E-commerce giant Alibaba launched this week a special app for the older people at Taobao, its online shopping website. A logical step, says retail analyst Ben Cavender to Reuters. “It’s easier now than it was in the past to get some of these older users to actually open up their wallets and spend.”

Dalian Wanda Group’s commercial property arm secured a US$5.4 billion investment from a group led by tech giant Tencent Holdings, a major move for the troubled real estate giant, hoping to get a Shanghai IPO, says business analyst Ben Cavender to Reuters.